After losing her faith, a former evangelical Christian felt adrift in the world. She then found solace in a radical technological philosophy – but its promises of immortality and spiritual transcendence soon seemed unsettlingly familiar.

I first read Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, in 2006, a few years after I dropped out of Bible school and stopped believing in God. I was living alone in Chicago’s southern industrial sector and working nights as a cocktail waitress. I was not well. Beyond the people I worked with, I spoke to almost no one. I clocked out at three each morning, went to after-hours bars, and came home on the first train of the morning, my head pressed against the window so as to avoid the spectre of my reflection appearing and disappearing in the blackened glass.

At Bible school, I had studied a branch of theology that divided all of history into successive stages by which God revealed his truth. We were told we were living in the “Dispensation of Grace”, the penultimate era, which precedes that glorious culmination, the “Millennial Kingdom”, when the clouds part and Christ returns and life is altered beyond comprehension. But I no longer believed in this future. More than the death of God, I was mourning the dissolution of this narrative, which envisioned all of history as an arc bending towards a moment of final redemption. It was a loss that had fractured even my experience of time. My hours had become non-hours. Days seemed to unravel and circle back on themselves.

The Kurzweil book belonged to a bartender at the jazz club where I worked. He lent it to me a couple of weeks after I’d seen him reading it and asked him – more out of boredom than genuine curiosity – what it was about. I read the first pages on the train home from work, in the grey and ghostly hours before dawn.

“The 21st century will be different,” Kurzweil wrote. “The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems … and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future.”

Like the theologians at my Bible school, Kurzweil, who is now a director of engineering at Google and a leading proponent of a philosophy called transhumanism, had his own historical narrative. He divided all of evolution into successive epochs. We were living in the fifth epoch, when human intelligence begins to merge with technology. Soon we would reach the “Singularity”, the point at which we would be transformed into what Kurzweil called “Spiritual Machines”. We would transfer or “resurrect” our minds onto supercomputers, allowing us to live forever. Our bodies would become incorruptible, immune to disease and decay, and we would acquire knowledge by uploading it to our brains. Nanotechnology would allow us to remake Earth into a terrestrial paradise, and then we would migrate to space, terraforming other planets. Our powers, in short, would be limitless...

Some possible precipitating factors are already in place. How the West reacts to them will determine the world’s future, says Rachel Nuwer.

The political economist Benjamin Friedman once compared modern Western society to a stable bicycle whose wheels are kept spinning by economic growth. Should that forward-propelling motion slow or cease, the pillars that define our society – democracy, individual liberties, social tolerance and more – would begin to teeter. Our world would become an increasingly ugly place, one defined by a scramble over limited resources and a rejection of anyone outside of our immediate group. Should we find no way to get the wheels back in motion, we’d eventually face total societal collapse.

Such collapses have occurred many times in human history, and no civilisation, no matter how seemingly great, is immune to the vulnerabilities that may lead a society to its end. Regardless of how well things are going in the present moment, the situation can always change. Putting aside species-ending events like an asteroid strike, nuclear winter or deadly pandemic, history tells us that it’s usually a plethora of factors that contribute to collapse. What are they, and which, if any, have already begun to surface? It should come as no surprise that humanity is currently on an unsustainable and uncertain path – but just how close are we to reaching the point of no return?

While it’s impossible to predict the future with certainty, mathematics, science and history can provide hints about the prospects of Western societies for long-term continuation.

Safa Motesharrei, a systems scientist at the University of Maryland, uses computer models to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that can lead to local or global sustainability or collapse. According to findings that Motesharrei and his colleagues published in 2014, there are two factors that matter: ecological strain and economic stratification. The ecological category is the more widely understood and recognised path to potential doom, especially in terms of depletion of natural resources such as groundwater, soil, fisheries and forests – all of which could be worsened by climate change...

OWON: America faces annihilation of their fleets and infantry units if fighting Russia or China now. As for Nato, a hopeless waste of money which will be eradicated over 2 days.Stop the Waste!

"Back in the 1980s a senior British army officer told me that Soviet EW systems had the potential to reduce communications in modern battlefields to the level of the 1914-1918 war, and that NATO was completely unprepared for this threat. I presume he was exaggerating, but there is no doubt the Russians take Electronic Warfare extremely seriously, and there seems to be a general consensus that they hold a wide lead over the West in this area."

Russia is quite able to make a battlefield go dark for a opponent while they have full communication and coordination, including the robotic weapons that are fully integrated into their infantry units. The problem is whether anyone cares until the moment they meet the Russians on a battlefield.

Following US missile strike on Syria Russia provides detailed information of its Electronic Warfare systems capable of jamming US systems.

Following rumours – never confirmed and possibly false – that Russian electronic warfare systems jammed the guidance systems of the 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles the US launched at Syria on 6th April 2017, supposedly causing 36 of the missiles to miss, the Russians have provided an unusual amount of information about their normally highly secret Electronic Warfare (EW) systems.

The ostensible reason for doing this is that Russia celebrated EW workers’ day on 15th April 2017. However that does not really explain why the Russians should be producing this information now, four days after that day.

As with the recent publication of the details of the test of the new hypersonic Zircon anti-ship missile, it is difficult to avoid the impression that this sudden flood of information about Russia’s EW system is intended as a warning to the US. Specifically, the Russians are warning the US not to try the same sort of missile strike that they recently carried out against Syria against Russia.

Presumably the delay in publishing details of the systems was caused by the need to obtain permission to declassify some details of the systems for publication, whilst continuing to conceal others. Given the highly classified nature of this material it is likely this would have needed approval at a very high level within Russia’s government, conceivably from President Putin himself...

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is demanding details on the funding of a controversial opposition research dossier on President Trump from the 2016 campaign.
The chairman of the Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Fusion GPS — a firm that reportedly hired former British spy Christopher Steele to investigate the then-GOP candidate — asking for details on Steele, who hired the firm and if it shared the document with the FBI.

"When political opposition research becomes the basis for law enforcement or intelligence efforts, it raises substantial questions about the independence of law enforcement and intelligence from politics," Grassley wrote.

He added that the Judiciary Committee "requires additional information to evaluate this situation."

Grassley is digging into Steele over the controversial dossier, which alleges that the Russians had compromising information on the president.

Grassley wants to know who first hired Fusion GPS to do opposition research against Trump, the details of the contract and copies of the contract, as well as information on any additional clients who hired the firm to research Trump...

An article in the Guardian last week provides more confirmation that John Brennan was the American progenitor of political espionage aimed at defeating Donald Trump. One side did collude with foreign powers to tip the election — Hillary’s.

Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump’s candidacy. He used their phony intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people.

John Brennan’s CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump. An official in the intelligence community tells TAS that Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism, decorating offices with “Hillary for president cups” and other campaign paraphernalia.

A supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War, Brennan brought into the CIA a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump. He bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as “non-partisan.”...

Britain will have to pay off obligations to Brussels for years after Brexit, remain subject to European Union courts and continue to let relatives of European immigrants settle in the UK, according to draft EU negotiating documents.

The demands are contained in a paper, seen by Reuters, that outlines key negotiating guidelines for Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, who will launch talks on a Brexit treaty after Britain’s general election on 8 June.

Ending free movement of workers from EU states, budget contributions to Brussels and oversight by the European court of justice (ECJ) are central to Theresa May’s plans for leaving the EU, due to happen in March 2019 after a two-year negotiating period.

But in language that echoes a tough line taken by the 27 other EU leaders who will endorse a common position at a summit on 29 April, the paper spells out Brussels’ aim to protect the rights of 3 million EU citizens living in Britain, extract cash from London to cover a wide range of existing commitments and ensure EU judges can hold Britain to the treaty after Brexit.

The paper does not set out a figure on what Britain might owe – an estimate of €60bn (£50bn) floated by the EU has been dismissed by ministers – but says the exit treaty should both set a “global amount” to honour financial obligations, subject to later adjustments and “a schedule of annual payments” that would reflect the fact that loans and guarantees made by the EU while Britain is a member extend well beyond 2019...

The arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is now a “priority” for the US, the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has said.

Hours later it was reported by CNN that authorities have prepared charges against Assange, who is currently holed up at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Donald Trump lavished praise on the anti-secrecy website during the presidential election campaign – “I love WikiLeaks,” he once told a rally – but his administration has struck a different tone.

Asked whether it was a priority for the justice department to arrest Assange “once and for all”, Sessions told a press conference in El Paso, Texas, on Thursday: “We are going to step up our effort and already are stepping up our efforts on all leaks. This is a matter that’s gone beyond anything I’m aware of. We have professionals that have been in the security business of the United States for many years that are shocked by the number of leaks and some of them are quite serious.”

He added: “So yes, it is a priority. We’ve already begun to step up our efforts and whenever a case can be made, we will seek to put some people in jail.”

Citing unnamed officials, CNN reported that prosecutors have struggled with whether the Australian is protected from prosecution by the first amendment, but now believe they have found a path forward. A spokesman for the justice department declined to comment...